End of my world

When I hear thunder, I don’t always think of thunderstorms. More often than not I sit and listen in the hopes the world won’t end in which case it would be time for me to wet my pants. The longer I’m home the more I think it may never be the way it was before I left. Things are changing so much in this country. I really believe we are now seeing the beginning of the end, of the United States if not the world.
It’s a feeling maybe a feeling everyone has, maybe a feeling only I have, but it is a feeling of impending doom. Something terrible is about to happen that none of us, even me, was expecting. Something we can’t change or keep from happening. War is upon us, political war, civil war, germ war. To me the most likely kind of war is the kind that we don’t even know about. Suddenly it won’t be ok for people to have opinions of their own, beliefs of their own, minds of their own, and it will happen in such a way that none of us realized it was happening.
Being part of a war changes everything. And to me the war that I was in was such a clean war for almost the whole thing. We got up and we ate went to work at a hospital where we treated appendicitis, athletes foot, jungle rot, std’s, and the occasional equipment malfunction. After work we went back to our air conditioned rooms, read, watched tv , or played on the computer then went to bed. The only thing bad about that part of my time in Iraq was a terrible chain of command that thought we should work 6 twelve hour shifts a week. Even when you’re not treating the injuries of war day in and day out, working 72 hours a week can be stressful.
After being in that place of ease for 6 ½ months I was taken from there and put in a place where I had to fear for my life daily. Well to be fair I didn’t actually fear for my life, I just should have. While I was there I felt the oddest detachment of emotions. One of the months that we were there was especially bad, we were getting bombed a lot, and we had so many patients. Just no sleep that counted for anything, and I remember being annoyed that I didn’t get a chance to sleep rather than being scared. My roommate had a healthy fear for her life, and mine from what I could tell. She is a great lady, that was a bundle of nerves from the time that we set foot on that installation to the time we left it. She saw one of our doctor’s die. I remember him we were goofing off at a fake massive casualty alert one day and the next day he was dead. Now I guess I am far enough removed from the situation to be sad at his passing, but at the time I was unemotional about the whole thing.
We had a lot of casualties while we were in that place, too many young people that died. We had the occasional problems with rape. I know it seems pretty wrong that one soldier, marine, should rape another but it did happen. We had one girl come in that was suspected of being raped, I was off that night, but they called me in because I was the only female medic on nights. Its turned out not to be a rape, but some kind of domestic abuse thing with her husband. When her unit got the whole things sorted out, she and her husband stayed overseas. I wish to God they had sent her home, because two months later she was killed in a mortar attack. She took her fragment to the chest and they brought her to us. We were able to get her into OR, but because the damage was directly to her heart there was nothing they could do, and she died. Right after we found out she didn’t make it one of the doctors commented that the patients never said anything meaningful right before they die. You know like on TV. The last thing she ever said was, "I can’t breathe".